Metal and metal oxide electrodes play a significant role in many state-of-the art high-tech applications including photonics, membranes, biological supports, sensing, electrochromics, and in various green technologies, such as, photocatalytics, Li-ion batteries and photovoltaics. Forming nanostructures on an electrode surface is a technique used to increase the surface area of an electrode. Nanostructured metals and metal oxides have been fabricated using oblique incidence deposition, traditional photolithography, solution-phase and hydrothermal growth of crystalline rods, oxidation or anodization of metal foils, and vapor-phase growth of metal oxides. Existing methods for nanostructuring electrodes typically are difficult, time-consuming, costly, resource-wasteful, and/or lacking in reproducibility. Additionally, some methods use a sacrificial template to form the nanostructures, necessitating a new template for each nanostructured unit produced.